The success of ECW led to the founding of a number of other "hardcore" and "deathmatch" wrestling federations, and no less an organization than the WWF followed their lead. WCW tried to foster a backlash to this, painting themselves as a "family-friendly" wrestling show, but they soon jumped on the bandwagon after that posture failed. After all, how "family-friendly" can a show about people beating the snot out of each other be?
And even before that, WCW head booker Jim Herd decided to try and mimic the WWF's success with the "Rock 'n Wrestling Connection" by tying WCW to another aspect of pop culture — namely, movies. Fortunately, he dropped that idea after the first shots, a wrestler based on The Wizard of Oz and a Pay-Per-View appearance by Robocop, failed miserably, but it wasn't Herd's first bad idea, and definitely not his last.
When it started in 2002, TNA was an alternative to the WWE, until over the years, they became "WWE Lite".
Naturally with the success of the New World Order every fed in the universe even your local mom and pop indy needed to have a stable trying to take over the company.
And of course every fed including the mom and pop indy also needs to do an evil scheming authority figure whose sole reason for existing seems to be making life miserable for the babyface du jour. Naturally said babyface is almost always a badass nineties anti hero.
In the Attitude Era of the late 90s the likes of The Rock and Stone Cold popularised the anti-hero in wrestling storylines so that for a good while it wasn't just faces vs heels, it was more like heels that got booed vs heels that got cheered.
With the success of Sunny and Sable, two hot blonde bombshells that were pure T&A, WWE began bringing in more women to feature in spreads in their magazines such as Debra, Ivory, Tori and Trish Stratus. Thus the WWE Divas were born.
Chyna was presented as an anti-diva who competed with the men and even won the Intercontinental title three times. Over the next few years there was a lot more emphasis on talent over looks in women's wrestling in wrestlers such as Lita, Molly Holly and Jazz being pushed to the top of the division. Trish Stratus as well who started out as eye candy but worked to improve her wrestling.
TNA began creating PPV events centered around specific gimmick matches (eg. "Lockdown" a PPV that had all cage matches on the card) so WWE started releasing gimmick PPVs such as "Extreme Rules" (every match is a different gimmick match), "TLC: Tables, Ladders and Chairs" (featured a ladder match, table match, chair match and TLC match among others) and "Night of Champions" (every title is on the line).
This arguably started years earlier with WCW and their annual Uncensored PPV. Like Extreme Rules, every match on the card had a gimmick. TNA cannot take credit for originality here.
In 2008, John Morrison and The Miz debuted an online talk show on WWE.com known as The Dirt Sheet. This program was instrumental in getting the tag team over and showcasing their personalities, and also generated quite a few hits on the site. Within weeks, other online shows started appearing from the likes of Cryme Tyme, Matt Striker, and even Colt Cabana Scotty Goldman. The only one that lasted longer than a couple weeks was Cryme Tyme's Word Up, which resulted in a feud between the two tag teams.
And in 2011, lightning struck again, as the success of Zack Ryder's Youtube series, Z! True Long Island Story, led to a number of other underutilized wrestlers starting their own Youtube accounts, including Ryder's former tag-team partner, Curt Hawkins.
Actually, indy wrestler Claudio Castagnoli started a YouTube series with goofy, tongue-in-cheek humor and random segments/skits a year before Ryder did. It caught a lot more wind and notice once Ryder's series started, though.
